Musical partnerships between keyboard players aren’t too common. In the case of Clive Nolan and Oliver Wakeman, theirs has lasted 25 years so far, but their acclaimed Gothic trilogy project remained unfinished – until now. Prog uncovers the happy ending to the fables old and new on Tales By Gaslight.

Words: Alison Reijman Images: Max Clarke

“I was getting emails from people saying they had seen Jabberwocky on eBay for £150. That’s ridiculous, because no matter how much people like the album, there is no way they should be spending £150 getting hold of a 20-year-old record.”

Oliver Wakeman

“The executive decision was made when Oliver said he had an idea that could make us millionaires!” recalls Clive Nolan.

That potential money-spinning idea related to the third part of Nolan and Wakeman’s Gothic rock opera collaboration, which they began more than 20 years earlier when they released Jabberwocky, based on Lewis Carroll’s famous poem of the same name, and The Hound Of The Baskervilles, inspired by the Sherlock Holmes novel penned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in 1999 and 2002 respectively. But the concluding album, based on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, never happened.

However, they were aware there was still enough interest from fans for them to consider remastering both albums to 2021 sonic standards while, at the same time, seize the opportunity to go through their musical files to locate sufficient material for the third part, now called Dark Fables. To their astonishment, they had also learned that original versions of Jabberwocky were fetching three-figure sums on internet selling platforms.

Ticking every box of the discerning prog fan, the resultant three-CD box set, Tales By Gaslight, brings together the three albums in one lavishly illustrated presentation package. It contains remastered versions of Jabberwocky and The Hound Of The Baskervilles, while Dark Fables includes more than 30 minutes of material intended for Frankenstein as well as unreleased and reimagined material from the first two. For the box set, Rodney Matthews and Peter Pracownik have provided the original and new artwork. Pracownik also created the cover for Dark Fables on which both Nolan and Wakeman have written liner notes about the project.